After a few minutes spent listening to BTK’s exploits, the man we’d come to interrogate turned to putty in our hands. Over the next five hours, he walked us through every dark, twisted corner of his sad life, sharing details he’d never told anyone, confiding that he’d made up all the crap about demons in order to be able to cop an insanity plea if he ever got caught. By the time Ressler and I emerged from the interrogation room, our heads were spinning. And we owed it all to some deranged killer in Wichita.
The clock on my bookshelf read two-thirty. Upstairs, my wife slept like a baby. My two little girls were tucked away in their beds. The house was so quiet that even down here in my study I could make out the soft rhythm of my wife’s breathing. It reminded me of surf breaking on the beach where I used to hang out as kid, growing up on Long Island.
I was jealous of her peace. And as I sat there listening to the make-believe waves, I felt another pang of jealousy rise up inside me.
How,
I wondered just like Berkowitz,
could a guy like BTK just turn it on and off like he did?
I’d already concluded that one of the reasons he’d managed to elude us was his consummate ability to compartmentalize his life—to appear normal on the outside and keep his perverted, murderous alter ego locked up inside. He’d somehow found a way to prevent his dark inner world from seeping out and infecting his outer world.
I was dying to know how he’d managed to do it.
When they catch this son of a bitch,
I thought to myself,
I’m gonna look him up and get him to tell me.
Inside my briefcase were the notes I’d penciled from my meeting earlier that day with the two detectives from Wichita. Together with a group of my profilers and a handful of the agency’s top criminologists, we listened as the men walked us through the case. This time they’d come to us looking not so much for a profile of the UNSUB, but for some proactive techniques they could use to flush the killer out into the open.
After we listened to the presentation, the one idea that came to mind was that police should organize a community-wide public meeting where the BTK murders would be discussed. The purpose of the gathering, held in a location central to all the crime scenes, would be to get the UNSUB to attend. From my experience with many of the serial killers I’d hunted in the past, I knew that their enormous egos and feeling of invincible superiority make it difficult for them to stay away from such meetings.
My plan was that investigators would covertly photograph those in attendance and identify all the vehicles outside the community hall. And because I was convinced that the killer was a police buff, I suggested that an announcement should be made that the authorities were looking for potential volunteers “if the need should arise in the future when the police might need help.” The only requirements were that the applicants needed their own transportation and some law enforcement training or education.
The two detectives from Wichita scribbled down my suggestion, but it ate at me that there was something more that could be done, something altogether new.
Sitting there in my study, all I could think about were the eyes of Josephine Otero, BTK’s eleven-year-old victim in his first series of murders, the one he’d hung from a pipe in the basement of her family’s house, after strangling her parents and younger brother. Nothing in my career could ever prepare me for what I imagined this innocent little girl must have endured before finally dying of asphyxiation. I’d worked more child homicide cases than I cared to remember, but something about this one was different.
This killer didn’t feel human to me. All the guys I’d chased and studied were monsters, but even with the worst of them I usually sensed something familiar and human. No matter how horrific their butchery, I found some shred of fragility within them. But I didn’t get that with this killer in Wichita. Just when I thought I’d studied and classified every variation of evil, along comes this freak. He resided in a class all by himself.
I wandered back upstairs and climbed into bed. Before long, I felt myself begin to drift, but I fought the urge, trying to remain in that strange region between wakefulness and sleep. It was a place where I’d sometimes retrieved the information that helped me put together a profile. I waited for my mind to unearth something on the ghost I was chasing, but nothing came.
After a few minutes, my lids grew unbearably heavy.
How does someone like this start?
I whispered to myself as I began to fade.
And how can I put an end to him?
2
The sun had yet to appear in the sky when I awoke the next morning, a few hours after finally drifting back to sleep. Out of habit, I quickly rolled over to check the legal pad sitting on my bedside table. Years before, I’d trained myself to dream about whatever case I was working on. More often than not, in the middle of the night, still half asleep, I’d open my eyes, fumble for a pen, and scribble cryptic notes on the pad, clues culled from the depths of my subconscious. My wife, Pam, hated this habit of mine because it always woke her up.
But on this chilly fall morning, the top page appeared blank. I switched on a lamp, just to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Pam moaned. I turned off the light, got dressed in the darkness, and drove the winding twenty-one miles to my office at Quantico, located on the main floor of the agency’s forensic science building. The location was a definite upgrade from the previous home of the Behavioral Science Unit—in the basement beneath the FBI Academy’s library. But the downside was that my office was constantly awash with nauseous, chemical fumes from the various laboratories in the building. On any given day, researchers attempting to develop more reliable, valid methods for testing crime evidence would tinker with various types of acid, iodine fumes, and gunpowder. Explosions and eye-burning smoke were commonplace. So were clanging fire alarms and evacuations of our building.
I was the first guy in the office as usual, making it to my desk by 6:30 A.M. The first thing I did was close my office door so that no one would think I was there. I lived for the cases and loathed the unavoidable administrative duties that came with running a unit that was on the verge of mushrooming to forty-three people, including twelve FBI agents and twenty-one support personnel. I was constantly at odds with the paper-pushers above me, but the men and women of my unit knew I’d do anything for them. In between hopping from one brush fire to the next, I often spent hours each day either helping them with their work or providing a shoulder to cry on.
It was nearly noon by the time I began rifling through my filing cabinets, trying to locate the profile I’d written on BTK back in 1979. As I dug through my files, I thought back to that day in fall 1974 when I first heard about BTK from a couple of veteran homicide detectives who worked for the Milwaukee PD. Although it wasn’t part of my job description, I was itching to gain experience in the science of murder investigation. That night in 1974, I dug up what I could find on this unknown killer in Wichita at the public library. I was amazed that news of his murders hadn’t received more play in newspapers outside of Kansas and noticed that the local cops appeared to be keeping a tight lid on information about the case.
A few months afterwards, I wrote about BTK in a research paper for one of my graduate courses in abnormal psychology. In it, I noted that other mass murder cases, such as Charles Whitman (the Texas Tower sniper in Austin) and Richard Speck in Chicago, garnered national headlines, whereas the Otero family homicides received precious little play. I found myself seeing parallels to professional sports and how the athletes all want to play in the big media venues like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I wondered if BTK felt slighted by the lack of attention his killings were receiving and frustrated that he lived in such a backwater media market.
I eventually unearthed my BTK file from beneath a sheaf of similar profiles penned over the past few years. Three pages long, with a cover sheet stapled on top, it read, “The attached analysis is only as good as the information that has been provided. In addition, it may be necessary to totally change or modify this analysis if new information is developed—such as additional victims, more forensic evidence, or new information obtained from research.”
I rolled my chair up tight against my desk and laid the pages down on top of the clutter. As I began reading the words I’d typed years before, I felt it all coming back to me:
MULTIPLE HOMICIDES. WICHITA. The murders of the BTK Strangler are the result of a fantasy acted out. A fantasy where for the first time in his life, he is in a position of importance and dominance. He is an inadequate type, a nobody, who, through his crimes, has placed himself into a position of importance. The BTK Strangler is now a somebody who is receiving the recognition he feels is long overdue him. To show his inadequacies, he is not even very original in his crimes. He must pattern himself after other notorious killers such as the .44 caliber killer, better known as the “Son of Sam” in New York City. Much of the verbiage that your subject is using (in his letters) probably comes out of recent publications in detective magazines.
Your subject is alienated, lonely and withdrawn. He would not be expected to have any lasting relationships with others and would lead a solitary existence dominated as mentioned above—by fantasy and magical thinking. His killing is an attempt on his part to find affection and acceptance. He fears everyone, including himself. He would not be expected to have ever enjoyed any normal relations with women and probably has never had a normal heterosexual relationship with one. When he is not killing, he experiences intense fear that he is not “normal” and therefore kills to cope with his disorder in an attempt to escape from his own fantasies. Thus, he can be expected to kill again and to do so in a compulsive repetition of the pattern he has already established. His victims can be anyone either male or female, who are both loved and outgoing. His victims will be in a position of vulnerability, one where he can totally render them helpless. His victims represent his own feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. His own life has been disruptive. He probably comes from a background where his family was broken. He was raised by an overbearing mother who was inconsistent with her discipline. His father probably left home, either by marital separation or death, when he was a youth. Your subject may have been raised by foster parents.
Your subject was an average student in the classroom. However, he was more adept at disrupting the class by using profanity and pranks. His language and statements make us believe that he has some military experience and/or is a police buff. He probably has had run-ins with police in the past, such as assault, and/or breaking and entering (B&E). His involvement with B&Es will show that the items taken were of insignificance. Items taken were more for reason of a fetish or a strong urge to obtain an article of clothing that he is fond of—or the thrill of committing a crime that will leave little evidence to investigating officers. The BTK Strangler may have a history of voyeuristic activities and he may have an arrest record for same. He hunts his victims by selecting neighborhoods where he can peruse different homes without being detected. Furthermore, his victims will live in an area where, if need be, he can have an easy escape route, such as a neighborhood park, where he can secrete himself to elude the police.
His killings are impulsively motivated and without elaborate planning. He seeks out targets of opportunity. Such individuals of this type are frequently mechanically adept. They suffer from insomnia and thus would find difficult to hold steady employment. Control of himself and of his environment is essential for such a person. Although he is gaining in confidence, he is still shy, withdrawn, asocial and isolated. Such persons have typically been raised in overly strict and religious fashions.
As a counter strategy technique, your department must not make any statements concerning the killer’s mental condition. That is to say, don’t allow the media to label him as some psychotic killer. If they have already done so, your best strategy would be to align yourself with the killer and not the psychiatric experts. Any press releases should clearly state that he is a killer who must be apprehended and that he is not a psychotic animal, if the press has already painted him to be this. This approach may reduce the killer’s anxiety concerning his own psychiatric health and reinforce his own guilt feelings by removing the rationalization of the excuse of psychiatric cause and hence non-responsibility for his acts.
Extended periods between his murders may be for reasons when he was absent from the area either as a result of military service, schooling, incarceration, or mental treatment. It is not uncommon for subjects such as yours to frequent police hangouts in an attempt to overhear officers discussing the case. Furthermore, such offenders will be at the crime scene observing detectives investigating the case and looking for clues to the homicide. All this allows the murderer to fulfill his ego and gain a feeling of superiority. He may go so far as to telephonically contact your department and provide information relative to the crime.